A run ‘n gun filmmaker’s POV on the business and creative world of new media and web tv

Showcase Episodes for The Hayley Project

January 17, 2008

Quick update on The Hayley Project.
16 episodes done (minus music and title sequence)….
Music scoring going smoothly so far….
We need a title sequence bad….

Also, we recently selected our “showcase” episodes that we plan to show distributors/partners/sponsors/girls/whoever cares. The selection process was interesting and really made us think about our series in general. Basically, this became an exercise in marketing and promotion.

Out of 37 episodes, my partner and I both selected our top 10 that we thought were relevant. We selected these 10 based on a number of factors, including the following:

Hayley as a strong female character – we knew we had to have at least one episode that focused primarily on the hero’s “call to action”. We chose an early episode that accomplished a few things. First, the episode demonstrates that Hayley is an independent strong female character. Second, the episode we picked shows that the “world” is against her (underdog story). And finally, the episode shows her motivation for investigating in the series. The episode we picked was a no-brainer.

Interesting/fun character interactions – the fun of the series will come from how supporting characters interact with each other, as well as the quirky characters Hayley investigates along the way. This interaction helps set the tone of our series. We made sure to include a couple of episodes that really showcased character interactions.

Drama – Even though our series is really more “teen pop”, the heart and soul (read: hero’s throughline) is about the death of a friend. As such, we wanted to make sure we had one episode in our portfolio that demonstrates the driving force behind our hero’s actions. So we picked one of our more dramatic flashback episodes to fill this need.

One-off context – there are a ton of episodes that are really cool and have big payoffs from other episodes. The problem is you can’t convey the magnitude of the payoff if you show the episode by itself. So we resorted to episodes that made more sense within itself. Think of any TV series. If you wanted to get a friend hooked, your first inclination might be to show them an episode where some big twist happens. But if the friend hasn’t been watching the build-up, the payoff falls flat. Hence, we tried to pick episodes that are more independent on their own.

Production Value – my partner doesn’t like it when I use this term, but let’s face it. It matters. So we picked episodes that have nicer production design, etc. Who can fault me for that?

After writing our list, we jointly narrowed that list down to 5. The good news is we had a lot of discussion on several eps that we thought could have made the cut. Now we’re focused on completing these five episodes and getting music on them.